Background

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As mentioned in a previous post, and because Daxif is now Open Source, I will
be blogposting on a weekly series of How to Daxif: …. The first topic will
be how to setup Daxif as part of a Visual Studio project.

The reason we followed Microsoft on this matter was that we see a lot of other
consultancies creating monolithic frameworks which are almost impossible to
get away from. We would like to think that our approach is a bit more fair
in the way that if our customers would like to replace us, the consultancy
taking over, just need to have the basic understanding on how the Developer
Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM works.

As you can see it’s more or less the same: Plug-in and Workflow projects are the
same and the CrmPackage is just replaced by Daxif. We have added the BusinessDomain,
generated code from the MS CRM datamodel, and the BusinessLogic, reusability of
code projects; as well as the Blueprint project to store the MS CRM solution in
our source control system.

Daxif has helped us out where the Developer Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
wasn’t good enough:

Easily generate strongly typed proxy classes without having to run CrmSvcUtil.exe

Edit and register plug-ins without using the Plug-in registration tool

This component has never worked properly and to solve this issue, we have
added the syncSolution to Daxifs Plugins module. There will be a
blogpost on this topic very soon.

Create new web resources or extract existing web resources, add them to your
solution, edit them, and deploy changes all within Visual Studio.

When adding files to this componenet, it actually moves web ressources to a
specific container (HTML Page, JScript File, Style Sheet, … folders)
which most certanly would break any HTML5 app that was built for MS CRM, no
relative path will work. We have taken the approach that what you see locally
in your source control, should be mapped 1:1 to your MS CRM solution (code
should always be master). We handle this matter in Daxif with the
syncSolution in the WebResources modules. There will also be a
blogpost on this topic soon.

…

Install Daxif from Nuget and keep updated

Back to the setup of Daxif, the only thing that is needed is to add the Daxif
NuGet package to the Daxif project in Visual Studio:

Note: As I created the publisher before, Daxif will give an error as duplicate
publishers are not allowed

We don’t make MS CRM solutions, but software solutions

We tend to say that we don’t create MS CRM solution but software solutions. As
you can see, by combining Daxif with our XrmFramework (MS Developer Toolkit) We
are able to spend less time with the technical stuff that just should work
everytime, automation by removing the human part will always ensure a more
robust approach, and by spending more time implementing business logic, we think
that we are giving our customers more value for their money.